Run the Risk - Hardcover

Frost, Scott

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0399152482 ISBN 13: 9780399152481

Publisher: Putnam Adult, 2005

Synopsis

In the wake of a series of bizarre crimes, including a small-time shopkeeper's shooting death, a bungalow explosion, and the abduction of a teenage girl, Los Angeles homicide detective Alex Delillo is baffled by a tangle of ambiguous clues and follows leads that become increasingly violent. A first novel. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Scott Frost is a screenwriter whose credits include the television classics Twin Peaks and Life Goes On. Frost is at work on a second Alex Delillo novel.

Reviews

Pasadena bomb squad detective Dylan Harrison describes the man who's just blown up Lt. Alex Delillo's partner: "He's very skilled, very dangerous, and he enjoys his work." It's an apt, if understated, description, as Frost proves in this chilling debut novel about a serial-killer bomber who plans to demonstrate his incendiary powers on live TV during the annual Pasadena Rose Parade. Alex is a single mom whose feisty teenage daughter, Lacy, is captured by the bomber early on and used as bait to lead partners Alex and Harrison from one gruesome killing to the next. Alex sees herself as a failure as a mother, a fact she bemoans too often, and Harrison bears the burden of a murdered wife whose killer has never been caught, giving the two plenty of tragic backstory to engage reader sympathy. Frost's screenwriting roots (Twin Peaks; The X-Files) provide a solid background as he expertly shows rather than tells how the brainy bomber outwits his pursuers. All too often, savvy mystery readers guess what's going on way too early, but that won't happen here. The bomber is not only ahead of the police, he's just as far ahead of the reader. This, the first in a series, is a jaw-dropper that will leave readers clamoring for more.
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Though he has published a couple of novels--The List of Seven (1994); The Six Messiahs (1995)--Frost is probably better known as the cowriter of the cult TV show Twin Peaks. In this thriller, he introduces a series that has a good chance to bring him much wider recognition. Lieutenant Alex Delillo has mastered many challenges on her way to the top of Pasadena's homicide division. But the detective feels like a failure in her other job, as single mother to her teenage daughter, Lacy. Within hours of the story's start, Delillo's professional and personal lives come together in a horrifying way when Lacy reveals her ambitions as an ecoterrorist, a man is shot in a break-in, a bomb hospitalizes Delillo's partner--and it appears that the events may all be related. When Lacy goes missing, an emotionally unraveling Delillo stays on the job, wondering whether she'll get a second chance to make things right with her daughter. Frost has created a puzzle with razor-sharp edges, and as the stakes grow, he keeps putting new pieces on the table. The prose is sometimes overdone (the editor should have imposed a one-simile-per-page maximum), but Run the Risk was written for people who like their books frantic and frightening, and by those measures, it delivers the goods. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Putnam Adult
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0399152482
• ISBN 13: 9780399152481
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320